ma(r)king time
It’s the end of April and technically, it’s supposed to be a time for planting and growing seeds into seedlings, in order to see them flourish into proud young plants in the merry month of May. Sure, April was always going to be moody and fickle, offering us sun, rain, hail, thunder, snow, and sun again within the space of a few hours. But it’s been extraordinarily cold this year, and I’m behind with prepping the earth for all the eager boys and girls I’ve been nursing on my window sill.
On one of the rare sun-filled Saturdays, I was weeding the first patch of earth, and (because four neighbours simultaneously chose to rev up their electric lawn mower monsters) I plugged in my earphones, and found a podcast. I follow a few people, and usually just choose anything, trusting that I’ll like it. And goodness gracious did I like that one that day.
It was a conversation between Dr Rangan Chatterjee and writer and journalist Oliver Burkeman. They talked about Burkeman’s recent book 4000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (2021), and I immediately went and bought it (from a bookshop! Totally old school.)
Burkeman used to write a column for The Guardian on productivity apps and strategies until he realised that, really, we don’t need any of those actually. Trying to hurry time just results in our oh-so-cleverly laid out plans backfiring. Time will always win. Although there isn’t even anything to win, it kind of just is. There’s nothing to save or waste. Life is just…being.
So, instead of downloading the twentieth app with which to deal effectively with the avalanche of emails you’re receiving every day (for example pushing yourself towards that elusive Inbox Zero —- only to train people that you’re hyper-responsive, resulting in more emails coming your way, and no real work ever done); instead of implementing another “fool-proof” 4.am wake-up habit of the highly-successful millionaire; instead of constantly attempting to shave slivers of seconds off that odd experience that is “time”, Burkman wants you to just let go. Just let it go.
Saying No
Burkeman encourages us to accept that our time here really is finite, and that we will never get to do all the awesome things we would really really love to do. We had better devote ourselves to a few select people and activities rather than chase after all the *legitimately* inspiring new people and new activities beckoning us to run run run. So, while we obviously need to say “no” to stuff we don’t really want to do (if we can allow ourselves to say no), we also, alas, will need to reject things we genuinely feel good about.
I’d love to go to Mexico, but I probably never will in this life. I have friends I’d like to know better, essays I want to write, and paintings I’d like to see. But I will never be able to do some of those things, and perhaps not any. Because I only have 4000 weeks. If I get to 80 alright.
I must say the title is shocking, but once you’re beyond that, your sense of time is supposed to expand rather than contract, and make you anxious. Because Burkeman gives you permission to just accept and surrender. And I know this sounds awfully much like new-age woowoo, but it kind of is true.
The book found me at the right time, and it did manage to unlock this sea-change of attitude for me. Hard choices need to be made. And they can be made. Radical changes are, in fact, necessary. Whittling things down to a few people, places, and activities means I actually get to engage with those people, places, and activities rather than constantly whizzing by experience. All surface
Smaller-sizes and externally or communally-imposed time constraints are A Good Thing according to this kind of thinking. Muslims are enjoined to pray five times a day at relatively specific moments which takes mental load off individual choices and synchs the believer to other believers. Most people in the West have at least one day a week off, and that day being Sunday creates a kind of social leisure cohesion and relaxation we sense and enjoy (and which unemployed people do not, according to studies Burkeman cites).
Digital technology has given us the illusion of infinity. And perhaps the internet is, though I don’t think so. I think there is a storage space limit, just that it’s so crazily big that our minds primed for boundaries in front of our eyes and in our hands can’t grasp it, and so the web seems endless. Social media suggests there’s always one more post to see, one more video to click on, another status update to like. It’s all in the concept of the scroll. So, we’re labouring under the illusion (delusion, one might even say) that our lives, just as a bottomless website, extends infinitely.
Punctuation & Time
I’m curious how the book unfolds, but it also made me think of punctuation. Punctuation offers limits, too. A full stop at the end of the sentence gives it direction and changes the beginning retrospectively, sort of. If we’d never have that end point and would just bla bla continuously, there’d be little meaningful communication going on. Although…do we feel like we’re putting full stops when we speak? What if we never learnt to read and write, and wouldn’t know the concept of a sentence and full stop in the first place, how would be think of speech?
Considering the classical continuous script THATLOOKEDLIKEDTHISWITHOUTSPACESBETWEENWORDSORANYMARKATALL – considering that practise of simply noting down a string of words one after the other without any gradations of main and subordinate clauses, or without so much as a full stop marking the end of the sentence, because speech seems to flow freely and for ever, and writing just meant documenting speech, rather than a separate manifestations of language (this is a long sentence) – considering the continual flow of our spoken words, one might wonder whether the very idea of an end, a kind of bounds to speech, is perhaps alien to humans, and is rather a cultural habit than inherent in how we experience the world. Perhaps we don’t speak in sentences as such, but rather in rivers whose flow is sometimes loud and sometimes quiet – and what about thought anyway? Do we think in grammatically correct sentences, or is cognition (conscious and unconscious) actually something quite different?
Considering the classical continuous script THATLOOKEDLIKEDTHISWITHOUTSPACESBETWEENWORDSORANYMARKATALL – considering that practise of simply noting down a string of words one after the other without any gradations of main and subordinate clauses, or without so much as a full stop marking the end of the sentence, because speech seems to flow freely and for ever, and writing just meant documenting speech, rather than a separate manifestations of language (this is a long sentence) – considering the continual flow of our spoken words, one might wonder whether the very idea of an end, a kind of bounds to speech, is perhaps alien to humans, and is rather a cultural habit than inherent in how we experience the world. Perhaps we don’t speak in sentences as such, but rather in rivers whose flow is sometimes loud and sometimes quiet – and what about thought anyway? Do we think in grammatically correct sentences, or is cognition (conscious and unconscious) actually something quite different?
I don’t think any of this stuff is mutually exclusive, perhaps: I guess we have ways of modulating our speech and the ends of it (such as a question signalled by a voice going up; or posture; or other physical markers), and we have ways of doing that in writing when we lack those bodily signs of “I am done here”. In that sense, punctuation, yet again, stands in for our physical presence, ourselves, our hands, eyes, voice, subtle signs of communication.
Punctuation also provides borders for us to make sense of text. This sentence finishes here, and that clause depends on the other into which it is set (brackets anyone?). Punctuation makes text known, and without it, we’d struggle to see the wood for the trees. In that sense, punctuation marks time for us. It pauses, ends temporary endpoints, and then actual ends. The chapter. The entire book. Punctuation gives us clues how to hold ourselves through the experience of reading. Where to come up for breath, where to rest our eyes and thoughts.
Punctuation – and Burkeman’s book – proposes that because something doesn’t go on forever, it becomes significant. And because it is significant, we make time for it. We stake out a beginning and an end. Marking time means making time.
And so, paying a little more attention to commas and colons fosters a little more awareness to what it feels like to be alive. And remember: pick a small(er), so that you live to tell the tale!
